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Martha Gellhorn (1908 – 1998). “ Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential, not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of honorable behavior, involving the reporter and the reader.”. A wonderful life …. Martha Ellis Gellhorn born 1908, St Louis to liberal,

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Martha Gellhorn (1908 – 1998)

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Launches career as foreign correspondent by talking her way into free passage to Europe; leaves US with $75 in her pocket and works freelance, culminating in a position at the United Press bureau, Paris

Returns to US and finishes first novel, What Mad Pursuit, 1934

Works as relief investigator for the US Federal Emergency Relief

Administration and forms lifelong friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt

"I'm over-privileged. I've had a wonderful life. I didn't deserve it but I've had it."

“If anyone listened to them, no one acted on their warning. The doom they had long prophesied arrived on time, bit by bit. In the end we became solitary stretcher-bearers, trying to pull individuals free from the wreckage.”

“There is a hard, shining, almost cruel honesty to Gellhorn’s work.” Guardian

“One of the great war correspondents of the century; brave, fierce and wholly committed to the truth of the situation.”The Telegraph

During her lifetime, as well as creating ground-breaking journalism, Gellhorn wrote five novels, 14 novellas, a play and two collections of short stories.

“Reading Martha Gellhorn for the first time is a staggering experience. She is not a travel writer or a journalist or a novelist. She is all of these, and one of the most eloquent witnesses of the 20th Century.”

"Have a new housemaid named Martha and it certainly is a pleasure to give her orders. Marty was a lovely girl though. I wish she hadn't been quite so ambitious and war crazy..." Ernest Hemingway, post divorce

“The pictures are small but there are many, and it seems to me that they merge finally into one crowded appalling picture.”

“There is a single plot in war; action is based on hunger, homelessness, fear, pain and death… War is a horrible repetition.”

“I wrote very fast, as I had to; and I was always afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures which were special to this moment and this place.”

“The point of these articles is that they are true; they tell what I saw. Perhaps they will remind others, as they remind me, of the face of war. We can hardly be reminded too much or too often. I believe that memory and imagination, not nuclear weapons, are the great deterrents.”

“I hold to the relay race theory of history; progress in human affairs depends on accepting, generation after generation, the individual duty to oppose the evils of the time. The evils of the time change but are never in short supply and would go unchallenged unless there were conscientious people to say: not if I can help it.”

“We must always remember that we are not the servants of the state.”

“There has to be a better way to run the world and

we better see that we get it.”

“Painfully honest … a writer and reporter deserving of serious attention in her own right, not just a woman once married to a famous man. ” The Atlantic Monthly

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing; a habit.

Journalism at its best and most effective is education

Journalism is a means; and I now think that the act of keeping the record straight is valuable in itself.

We still have the right and duty, as private citizens, to keep our own records straight.

“You go into a hospital and it's full of wounded kids, so you write what you see and how it is. You don't say there's 37 wounded children in this hospital, but maybe there's 38 wounded children on the other side. You write what you see.”

“No one [in 1940] knew or cared much about the war in China, but Japan had become an Axis partner and what Japan did held a new menace. I wanted to see the Orient before I died; and the Orient was across the world from what I loved and feared for. Journalism now turned into an escape route.”

“My China articles were not entirely candid. They did not say all I thought, and nothing of what I felt. There was a severe censorship in China, but I was more troubled by an interior censorship, which made it impossible for me to write properly.”

“I had been included … in luncheon parties given by the Chiangs… I had accepted their hospitality, and since they owned China, it would be as if I had visited them as a guest and thanked them by writing unpleasant things about their house. I have never again accepted hampering hospitality.”

“The Japanese can never conquer China by force. People who can move their capital three times, carry factory machinery and university equipment over the mountains to safety, supply a front by sampan and coolie carrier, burrow into rock and survive endless bombing, build a thousand-acre airfield in a hundred days without machinery will endure to the end.” (penultimate para, p91)

“Time does not matter in China” (last para, p91)

High concept sentence:

“Well, Mr Ma,” I said, “in the long run, I’d hate to be Japanese.” (last para, p92, and concluding sentence of the piece)

“It was very cold but there were plenty of mosquitoes, that frail slow-moving kind with the curled-up hind legs, the malarial mosquito” (p80)

“A common soldier earns four and a half Chinese dollars a month (or twenty-three US cents) and he has a rice allowance” (p86)

Anecdote

The Group of Devils play (p89);

How they burn of the hilltop to get rid of tigers (p87)

Prophetic

Gellhorn is “an author making what might have seemed a bold declaration, but which history proved to be true” (Gene Mustain):

“In the long run, I’d hate to be Japanese” (p92)

“The late journalist Martha Gellhorn is remembered for her radical openness and bravery in discussing controversial political issues. Sadly, Gellhorn, a model for female journalists, has few followers who dare write articles with principled insights and honestly expose the truth behind the news.”

“This strange system of military under-pay, and the tragic lack of provision for the wounded, are the two greatest misfortunes of the Chinese Army. Always excepting war, which is a misfortune for everyone.” (p86)

“A writer publishes to be read; then hopes the readers are affected by the words, hopes that their opinions are changed or strengthened or enlarged, or that readers are pushed to notice something

that they had not stopped to notice before.”

“All of my reporting life, I have thrown small

pebbles into a very large pond, and have

no way of knowing whether any pebble caused

the slightest ripple. I don't need to worry about

that. My responsibility was the effort.”

“Martha was passionate and political, glamorous and exciting. She loved to drink and gossip and smoke and flirt. She was hugely entertaining. She was motivated by a deep-hearted, deep-seated concern for justice; she was the friend of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the neglected. And she was a good writer.” Bill Buford, fiction editor, The New Yorker